METHOD OF DETERMINING EPIDERMAL GROWTH FACTOR RECEPTOR AND HER2-NEU GENE EXPRESSION AND CORRELATION OF LEVELS THEREOF WITH SURVIVAL RATES

摘要

The present invention relates to prognostic methods which are useful in medicine, particularly cancer chemotherapy. The object of the invention to provide a method for assessing HER2-neu and/or EGFR expression levels in fixed or fixed and paraffin embedded tissues and prognosticate the probable sensitivity of a patient's tumor to treatment with receptor tyrosine kinase targeted chemotherapy by examination of the amount of HER2-neu and/or EGFR mRNA in a patient's tumor cells and comparing it to a predetermined threshold expression level for those genes. More specifically, the invention provides to oligonucleotide primer pairs EGFR and HER2-neu and methods comprising their use for detecting levels of EGFR and HER2-neu mRNA, respectively.